Cloud computing has been adopted in a wide variety of computing services, including remote data storage solutions, music and video streaming services, and a wide variety of other consumer and business solutions. In general, cloud computing provides several well-known benefits, including increased efficiencies through the use of shared resources, increased flexibility in accessing content without restriction to a particular device, lower up-front costs when hardware upgrades become available, and other advantages.
A server facility generally includes a plurality of racks located in a building. Each rack may contain a plurality of processing systems, sometimes referred to herein as terminal systems. Some terminal systems may include specially configured processing hardware that can run on or more applications. Some terminal systems may include large scale storage systems for data storage. The server facility may include a server controller that distributes the processing and or storage load to the terminal systems. The server controller and terminal systems are coupled to a network via corresponding network interfaces. Remotely located users can access processing or storage capabilities of the terminal systems in the racks via the network.
The terminal systems are operated by application service providers. A given application service provider may have one or more terminal systems in one or more of the racks at the server facility. In some cases, all of the terminal systems in all of the racks at a given facility may be dedicated to a single application service provider.
The application service provider often does not own the server facility that provides the rack space for its terminal systems, although it may own the terminal systems in the racks. More commonly, a separate server facility provider operates and maintains the server facility and one or more application service providers rent space in the racks for their terminal systems. The server facility provider may provide the racks, the electrical power to the racks, and cooling for the racks. The server facility provider's cost of running the server facility depends partly on the electrical power used to run the systems on the racks and partly on the cost of cooling the racks. Depending on the amount of heat generated by all of the racks in the server facility and the thermodynamic efficiency of the cooling system, the latter cost can be significantly larger the cost of running the systems on the racks. Furthermore, it is common for the server facility provider to charge the users of the racks a flat fee per month to cover the cost of cooling.
Many application service providers, e.g., social networks or online gaming services, require large numbers of terminal systems to accommodate large numbers of users. Such large application service providers often distribute their terminal systems among several server facilities. This may be done to distribute their terminal systems geographically to provide redundancy and security.
It is within this context that the present disclosure arises.